Welcome to How Gay Is It? Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this post contains spoilers for Lionsgate's Borderlands.)
Unfortunately, Borderlands isn’t just a bad video game adaptation, it’s a bad film.
Based on the game series of the same name, this latest title from Eli Roth is devoid of entertainment. Newcomers to the franchise will find themselves befuddled and wonder if this is truly spawned from a game that is generally considered amongst one of the best of all time. Fans of the game may get a kick out of an Easter egg here and there, but will likely find themselves even more disappointed than those unfamiliar with it.
The distinct visual stylings and memorable characters of the game have been reduced down to cheap echoes of their source material. Even Academy Award winners Cate Blanchett (who plays a bounty hunter called Lilith) and Jamie Lee Curtis (who plays… a xenoarchaeologist [yes you read that right] named Tannis) can do little to salvage this hunk of junk. Blanchett plays Lilith with a perma-smirk pasted onto her flawless face that we assume is masking her soul slowly being crushed. It’s either that or it's her dissociating and counting down the minutes until she can escape to whatever vacation home we hope the salary from this bought her.
Édgar Ramírez, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Janina Gavankar, and the voice of Jack Black round out the cast. Black voices the robot companion Claptrap, and somehow they manage to mutilate his natural exuberance and transform it into a forced and unfunny performance. The one bright side was Hart, who we normally find abrasive (and who is no friend of the community) was muted down to a nearly tolerable level.
Plot wise, it’s somehow overly convoluted and yet simultaneously ridiculously simplistic. Challenges the characters face are solved with shocking ease. Dialogue feels like it was lifted directly from the game, which in theory can be fine. However, Borderlands the film has no grasp of nuance and abuses lifting directly from the source. The "original" dialogue feels almost worse than the obvious call outs, so it’s a lose lose. The visual effects feel cheap, and the action is underwhelming.
We are mind boggled how this film made it into cinemas. On paper we understand the recipe is tempting. Highly successful source material/proven IP + prestige actors = no brainer, right? Oh so wrong. Perhaps if this film had come out closer to 2009, when the first game came out, we’d have been a little more forgiving. But the humor of the game hasn’t aged particularly well, and that seems to be what Roth and co-screenwriter Joe Crombie (which is supposedly a nom de plume for an unidentified contributor) seem hellbent on lifting the “humor” from the game. It’s not that the “comedy” in the film is particularly offensive (unlike the game franchise which has flirted with controversy there), but it’s just not funny.
Now the question that we at Out are always on the hunt for: How gay is it?! It’s tragically straight. This is particularly disappointing since the Borderlands game franchise (and extended storytelling/lore) do feature a fair amount of queer characters (including Tiny Tina, Tannis, and Moxxi who ARE featured in the film). There’s honestly not any sexuality in this film, aside from a few jokes and maybe an implied look or two. Even Saint Carol herself, Cate Blanchett, doesn’t radiate a lick of sensuality off her cheekbones (we’d still like them to slice us like marble). For the admirers of the male form, if you like brawn over brains (and a butterface situation since the character is masked) we guess there’s Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu’s berserker Krieg? But that’s stretching it.
Lionsgate
The erasure of any of the queer stories is well overshadowed by the failure of the story in general. On our list of bones to pick with the film, this is lower down than some of the catastrophic aforementioned issues. It saddens us to think how many creative independent films could’ve been funded with the budget of this. At a few points we got a bit of amusement out of how absolutely nonsensically unfortunate it was, but that feeling wasn’t sustained enough to push the film into “so bad it’s good” territory.
As a film we’re going to be generous and give it a 1.5 out of 5. Given the building blocks for it we could’ve seen it being outright offensive, so we’ll be magnanimous and say "sure it looks like a film, just a bad one." As for how many eggplants it garners, it gets a desolate 0 out of 5.
Borderlands is now playing in theaters.
